Modern democracy’s checks weaken but do not remove genocidal potential

Evidence

To be sure, thanks to the late-modern or postmodern surfeit of mutually canceling authorities, and due to the irredeemable polyvocality which goes together with political democracy and the weakening grip of the state powers, the chances of such political players gaining an upper hand and deploying the absolute powers of the state to set Holocaust-style “solutions” in motion are slim and remote. Yet to say with any degree of self-assurance that the forces eager for an Endlbsung (final solution) type of action, and either the necessary or sufficient conditions of their acting in that way are no longer present today, would be equally premature and imprudent. Over fifty years after the military rout of Hitler’s Germany, evidence continues to arrive of the tendency of the endemic tensions of Risikoleben and endemic modernization to condense in the projects of “cleaning-up” operations, of ethnic and/or racial purity, of transparent order with nothing to obscure or cloud the harmonious and homogenous native unity. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 440 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The real, corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical liberties. The contract may have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and political power; panopticism constituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion. It continued to work in depth on the juridical structures of society, in order to make the effective mechanisms of power function in opposition to the formal framework that it had acquired. The ‘Enlightenment’, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 346 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Democratic institutions can again produce countermeasures to abnormal accumulation — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1644; Direct democracy can itself enable the tyranny of a majority — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 77; Genocidal potentials remain present in modern society despite democratic constraints — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 440 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Genocidal potentials remain present in modern society despite democratic constraints #corroborates (0.98) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 440
• Formal democratic liberties rest on an unseen foundation of physical coercion #complicates (0.72) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 346